Project Almanac

Project Almanac was supposed to be all about time-travel. It can be seen that they tried. Well, at least for the first half of the film. Then they got carried away and everything collapsed. Lets see:

They obviously try to be rigorous with time-travel, as they try to disguise the paradox in one of the traditional ways: when Quinn draws a smiley face on his own neck while visiting his own bedroom in the past (one day earlier), the smiley appears on the time travelling version of himself at the same time. This is history rewriting itself as changes are made. (The alternative would have been that if the smiley face was drawn on his neck "yesterday", it should have been on his neck all along - this would have been the 'loop' solution.)

Here's this sequence:

Other time travel movies are quoted, and some difficulties of time-travel are addressed, making it all look quite good. But once the scene was set, we start getting into various inconsistencies. For example, when Quinn goes back to his Chemistry exam again and again, he should find his previous time-travelling selves already there answering the questions. The only way this could be explained is that they traveled back in time to avoid the previous time-jump before each new attempt, but there is no hint in the movie that this is what actually happens. Also, when David goes back to try again to flirt with Jessie his previous self should still be there doing it for the first time. In this case he could not even had done this trick, the first jump to that moment was done by all four friends and he would have had to stop all of them from travelling for him not be already there when he jumps the second time - but this would have meant that the others found out he was breaking the rule of never travelling alone, and this does not happen in the film. See a rather harsher analysis here: http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/project-almanac-throws-all-time-travel-laws-out-the-window-1614849/

And then there is the ending with the two cameras - the two versions of the same camera - a big debate is out there on what this means and how this could have happened (see http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92525/can-somebody-please-explain-the-end-of-the-movie-project-almanac-to-me but I have not found a coherent explanation yet. Actually, the DVD includes an alternate ending where there aren't two cameras which makes much more sense!

SO here are my scores: genuine time-travel: 3; scientific explanation: 1; paradox: could have received a 2, but for the inconsistencies this is reduced to 1. Visualisation: 0